If your company has recently made the decision to migrate from Slack to Microsoft Teams, you’re certainly not alone. Recent data suggests that nearly 75 million people use Teams on a daily basis at work. While the current work-from-home situation has certainly contributed to this number, there’s no arguing that Teams is a feature-packed collaboration software that serves the needs of enterprises both large and small. 

That’s not to say that Slack isn’t similarly strong in the features and offerings that come with both its free and paid plans. With more than 12 million daily active users in 2019 (a number that’s likely much higher by now), Slack devotees enjoy a simple, straightforward collaboration tool with an expansive suite of apps and extensive customization possibilities. 

Whatever your motivation for migrating from Slack to Teams, this guide brings you everything you need to know if you’re wondering can Microsoft Teams replace Slack, including where to begin, some advantages and disadvantages of migration, and how to train your teams on the new software. 

4 Benefits of Migrating from Slack to Teams

Since you’re reading this article about Slack to Teams migration, you probably already know many of the benefits of moving away from the Slack platform and onto Microsoft Teams. Nonetheless, we’ve outlined a few of the benefits we hear over and over from business owners. (And don't forget to contribute your own thoughts on Microsoft Teams, bad or good!)

1. Cost Savings

For a company that already pays for Microsoft licenses, the decision to migrate from Slack to Teams is a no-brainer. Paying to use Slack becomes a redundant expense now that the Microsoft suite of products includes Teams. While both are solid collaboration tools, the cost savings alone is a huge benefit of migrating from Slack to Microsoft Teams. While it’s true that Slack offers a free version, many users, like Brad Ness, Owner of Blue Laser Digital, find that the limits placed on message history and other features prevents it from being a scalable solution. “MS Teams had the same feature set that we used in the free version of Slack, like chat, channels and file sharing, but also allowed us to conduct virtual meetings and use screen sharing from the same application,” he says. 

2. Familiar Look and Feel

If your company has a large number of users who are already familiar with the Microsoft interface, the transition should be a smooth one. The Teams interface has the same look and feel as all other Microsoft products, which allows for seamless integration. In addition, Teams functions in tandem with other products in the 365 suite. For example, employees can schedule a meeting in Teams, and the time and date will sync to each attendee’s Outlook calendar. 

3. Enhanced Security

Security is a top-of-mind concern for businesses of all sizes, and in all industries. Kenny Trinh, Founder and CEO at Netbook News, found the security aspect of Microsoft Teams to be especially beneficial. “Teams contains Microsoft Azure which encrypts and protects all of your important files and documents. As your team gets bigger, security leaks and employees stealing valuable data become more likely. Moving to MS teams when you are a growing company is a good idea to ensure its security,” he says. 

4. Easy File Sharing

File sharing during meetings is as simple as the touch of a button, since products like Excel and PowerPoint are fully integrated into the platform. Simply share a file, and everyone at the meeting can not only view it, but make changes in tandem as well. 

2 Disadvantages of Migrating from Slack to Teams

Both Teams and Slack are top-notch, feature-packed collaboration tools. This may lead you to ask yourself, are there any disadvantages to moving from Slack to teams? We’ve listed a few of the top concerns below.

1. Customization is Lacking

Like all of its products, Microsoft Teams was built to be a collaboration tool at the enterprise level. That means there isn’t much customization that can take place. So if a company sees itself as a bootstrapping, code-slinging group of ninjas that likes to customize solutions to the hilt to ensure their every need is met, they may have a better experience with Slack. That’s because Slack contains fewer pre-built features, which allows it to operate as a more ad-hoc platform. 

Some users feel stifled by the lack of imaginative gifs and reaction emojis Teams has to offer. Those who have gotten used to Slack’s smorgasbord of on-point reactions will be disappointed by Teams’ straightforward offerings, which include little more than a heart, a smile, a frown and a thumbs up. 

2. Users Need a Microsoft Account

What’s more, Slack requires no membership in order to onboard an entire team. An administrator only needs to provide a download link and members can be up and running in no time. Teams, on the other hand, requires that each person using it has their own Microsoft account. Onboarding someone using a guest account simply isn’t worth the hassle. 

Key Differences Between Slack and MS Teams

Whether you think of them as advantages or disadvantages, there are several key differences between these two collaboration platforms. It helps to be aware of these when making the decision to migrate from Slack to Teams. 

Collaboration

Without a doubt, both Slack and Teams know a thing or two about collaboration. They’re both feature-packed offerings that successfully bring disparate groups of employees into a single space for seamless collaboration. Slack offers a number of different video conferencing apps, like Zoom, Google Hangouts and even Microsoft Teams Calls. Teams offers its own built-in video communication tool that features touch-button screen sharing, the ability to mute users and allows for a customized background. Both services allow users to share and edit files simultaneously, but Teams boasts a unique offering for email collaboration: it allows you to forward emails directly to a channel rather than a group of individuals. This reduces the need for email integration across teams.

User experience

Slack features a super simple interface that requires little to no training time to get up and running. It’s a streamlined offering that was built to allow users to customize their own user experience. Users tend to enjoy the host of fun reactions, along with the ability to post GIFs and other memes. On the other hand, Teams brings you the familiar Microsoft look and feel with full integration and excellent performance, but lacks the ability to customize and is limited in its reactions.

Security

Security is rightly on everyone’s mind these days. That’s why both Microsoft Teams and Slack have protocols in place to encrypt all data, messages, and files. In addition, they both support two-factor authentication. 

App integration

Most users agree that the Slack App Directory is more robust than Teams, but both products are racing to beef this up. Currently, Teams has over 150 partners, and the list grows almost daily. Both products allow integration with Trello, despite the fact that it’s owned by Slack. 

Price

Teams is included in the Microsoft 365 license, so it’s essentially free if a company is already using MS suite of products. Slack offers a free option which does have its limits, especially in the areas of file storage space, searchable message history and custom app limitations, but also offers two paid service levels as well. 

3 Factors to Consider Before Migrating Slack to Teams

If you decide to move forward with your Slack migration to Teams, you’ll first want to consider the data you want to transfer over, if any. While the easiest method is to simply start fresh and avoid moving any data from Slack, that’s not always the best idea, since there’s always the possibility that you’ll need a paper trail for an issue one day in the future. But that doesn’t mean you need to migrate every single word that was ever exchanged on Slack in order to have a cohesive migration from Slack to Teams. 

1. Prioritize channels and conversations of most importance 

The first step in planning a transition from Slack to Microsoft Teams is to get a handle on how much data you currently have, and how much of it needs to be moved to the new platform. Take a look at your channels and prioritize which are critical and which can be cut. Then dive deeper into the channels and examine conversations. 

The following topics are some you may want to keep for future reference: 

• Anything related to legal or human resources
• Anything related to a merger or acquisition
• Anything related to finances or taxes
• Anything related to a major product release

2. Know Your Slack Service Level

In a Slack to Teams migration, the service plan you’ve chosen for Slack will determine what can and cannot be migrated. So this is a good thing to check into early on if you’re wondering how I do extract data from Slack? While Slack’s free service offers excellent basic features and two-factor authentication, you’re limited when it comes to more advanced offerings like shared channels and member name and email management. Furthermore, migration from a free Slack service plan is limited to what the company calls the “standard export,” which only includes data in public channels, and even then, it will export only links to files rather than actual files. 

The Corporate Export, which is available to workspace owners on either of the two paid plans, allows a bit more flexibility, but only if legal and regulatory compliance is proven. This export allows both public and private channel export, along with direct messages and group messages. 

In order to use any of the third-party migration providers, like Cloudiway and Avasoft, you must be on the Plus plan, Slack’s highest service offering, and you must be approved for the Discovery API export mechanism. 

3. Know What Can and Can’t Be Migrated

Regardless of how you do a migration from Slack to Teams, there are certain things that can’t be migrated. For example, specialty applications. David Johnson ran into this issue during his company’s Slack migration. “The advantage with Slack is the ability to develop your own applications,” he says. “So, if you have built-in interoperability with G-Suite or if you’ve built your own custom apps (for example, we had alarms that trigger Slack notifications) then those don't migrate. You can move the conversations, but any specialty apps have to be recoded.”

How to Migrate from Slack to Teams

When you’re ready to begin your Slack migration, know that it’s helpful to first sit down with a pad of paper or a whiteboard and map out exactly what channels, messages and users you have, and what needs to migrate or get cut. In this section, we’ll walk you through some high-level steps you’ll take if you’ll be doing the migration alone. In the next section, we’ll discuss some of the third-party services you can choose that will handle the Slack migration for you. 

Migrate Direct Messages from Slack to Teams

While certain Slack plan levels do allow you to export direct messages, Teams doesn’t support importing them directly. In order to migrate direct messages from Slack to Teams, you’ll have to use a third-party solution. 

Migrate Channels from Slack to Teams

Because the two platforms use channels differently, you’ll have to do some mapping before you migrate channels from Slack to Teams. For instance, since Teams treats teams as a collection of channels, you will have to figure out which group of existing channels constitutes a team in Teams, and figure out which employees belong in each team. If your company only uses public channels, you’ll have no problem exporting these; however, private channels are exported only with permission, and only if you are a paid member. 

Migrate Users from Slack to Teams

Migrating Slack users to Microsoft Teams is rarely a seamless event; discrepancies in email format are almost certain to occur. That’s why it’s important to first browse through your company’s Slack users to create a list of users that must be migrated. Secondly, you may need to create a user mapping to figure out how best to transition users. Microsoft provides this document that contains a script you can use for this process. 

Migrate Apps and Integrations from Slack to Teams

In order to migrate your existing apps in Slack, gather a list of those you wish to migrate, then look for them in the Teams app store to see which are available. For those that aren’t, contact Microsoft support or find an app that works similarly enough for a relatively seamless Slack migration. 

Migrate Files and Attachments from Slack to Teams

The process of migrating your company’s Slack files and attachments to Microsoft Teams is a relatively straightforward one. However, there are a few things to keep in mind as you do so:

• Some content may be lost during migration
• Files will have to be converted to HTML in order to migrate
• The name of the person who wrote the thread will not be available
• There will be no timestamps on any of the data

This being the case, if you have a large amount of data related to a legal or compliance issue, it’s wise to look into ways to maintain the integrity of the data outside of the Slack migration process. 

Slack to Teams Migration Tools

Time is money, which is why many companies opt to use third-party services to help them complete their transition from Slack to Microsoft Teams. We’ve outlined two end-to-end Slack to Teams migration tools that charge a nominal fee per license or per channel, and one that allows you to bootstrap the process by running a script that converts all files from JSON to HTML. 

Cloudiway

In its tenth year of operation, Cloudiway is a comprehensive online migration tool that can support a number of different migrations, including a transition from Slack to Microsoft Teams. Using a simple SaaS interface, Cloudiway provides a speedy, efficient way to transition channels, teams, files, apps, emails and much more, without having to do all the manual work of moving things over. Through a six-step process that includes discovery, audit, preprocessing, renaming and reorganizing, batch migration and even delta passes, Cloudiway allows administrators to have a hands-off solution when they want to migrate from Slack to Teams. 

For $50 per team, Cloudiway will migrate end-to-end data associated with an unlimited number of users, and will perform as many delta passes as needed to ensure a seamless transition has been made. 

Avasoft

The popular Avamigratron tool is the brainchild of AvaSoft, a leading-edge software company from Pennsylvania. The migration tool offers a complete end-to-end migration from Slack to Teams, including user mapping, content mapping and features mapping. These steps ensure a seamless transition without having to worry about data loss or security implications.  

Gist 

For a more do-it-yourself approach to migrating from Slack to Teams, Trinh recommends Gist on Github. It’s a Slack to HTML conversion code base that allows users to circumvent messy, unusable JSON files that are exported from Slack and turn them into HTML files. This enhances readability and provides administrators with clean data that can then be imported to Microsoft Teams. “Gist is a free Slack conversion tool available on Github. It’s really worth checking out,” says Trinh. 

Training Your Team to Utilize Teams Post-Migration

There are countless ways to get your team up and running on Microsoft Teams. How you go about doing it will surely depend on factors like company size, company philosophy, employees’ ability and willingness to adopt new software and budget, among many others. However, Microsoft itself recommends a three-phase approach that many companies have found successful. Phase one, called “start,” involves migrating any existing data, setting up teams and planning how your company will adopt this collaboration tool. Phase two, “experiment,” begins when Teams is rolled out to a small group of initial users, whose personal experiences with the product will dictate future implementation and adoption across a wider scale. Finally, phase three, or “scale,” involves rolling out the product to your entire company, or a larger group therein. 

Trinh suggests beginning widespread training a few months before large-scale adoption begins. “This is the perfect time because it’s close enough to the time when employees will begin using Teams as to keep it relatively recent and top of mind, but it also allows for enough time to properly train your team on how to use it.” This is important since you’ll ideally want everyone up and running quickly, since collaboration and conversation are the lifeblood of your day-to-day business operations. 

In conclusion, your company’s transition from Slack to Microsoft Teams will be a unique migration that’s specific to your needs, your budget, and your data. Understanding how the migration happens is key to figuring out how to make it work in the best way possible for your team.